Staging the Gesture

Chapter 5, ‘Staging the Gesture’, examines an ingredient of the arts not fully appreciated in its own right. It considers the place of dramatic action and expressive movement in the arts, examining the ways in which gesture is combined with melody, word and image in the whole range of the performative arts—mime, dance, theatre, opera and cinema. Ballet, for instance, combines gesture, movement and music within an overall visual spectacle. Nor is gesture, or the gestural, absent from the visual, literary or musical arts.